Page:The art of controversy and other posthumous papers (IA artofcontroversy00schouoft).pdf/104

 with his noise; but neither expedient will serve him very long.

We must always try to preserve large views. If we are arrested by details we shall get confused, and see things awry. The success or the failure of the moment, and the impression that they make, should count for nothing.

How difficult it is to learn to understand oneself, and clearly to recognise what it is that one wants before anything else; what it is, therefore, that is most immediately necessary to our happiness; then what comes next; and what takes the third and the fourth place, and so on. Yet, without this knowledge, our life is planless, like a captain without a compass.

The sublime melancholy which leads us to cherish a lively conviction of the worthlessness of everything, of all pleasures and of all mankind, and therefore to long for nothing, but to feel that life is merely a burden which must be borne to an end that cannot be very distant, is a much happier state of mind than any condition of desire, which, be it never so cheerful, would have us place a value on the illusions of the world, and strive to attain them.

This is a fact which we learn from experience; and it is clear, à priori, that one of these is a condition of illusion, and the other of knowledge.